Something

for PNG old hands

Up From South. By Jack O’Neill. Published by Oxford University Press. $14.95.

In the late 1960 s or early 1970 s a bulky manuscript landed on my desk, along with a letter from a man named Jack O’Neill whom I did not know.

He was then living in Buderim, Queensland, but the manu script covered a period of his life as a prospector and alluvial miner in New Guinea between 1931 and 1937.

As an ex-prospector myself, his description of his wander ings in the NG bush - head down, arse up, as he accurately described it interested me greatly although in the form that he sent it, the manuscript

seemed a chancey publishing

proposition. It was too long, needed tightening up and lacked continuity for the aver

age reader. Nostalgic books about New Guinea were sprouting out of the under growth at that time and it seemed a bad time for us to go to too much trouble to produce another.

I suggested instead that if he did not want to do more work on it himself he send a copy of the MS to Bob Langdon’s Pa cific manuscript section at the Australian National University where it wouldn’t be altogether lost to posterity.

But Jack O’Neill had a mind of his own. He sent a copy of the MS to the National Li brary, Canberra, instead and in 1973 gave another copy to Jim Sinclair, then District Com missioner of the Eastern High lands District, NG,‘ who with O’Neill’s blessing began to edit it.

The result, a blend of Sinclair expertise in welding disparate bits of the original together and O’Neill’s unaf fected style in which a laugh and good humour are never far away, has now been published under the title Up from South.

O’Neill was 23 when in 1931,

more or less on impulse, he and three friends took passage on the old Montoro and landed at Salamaua. There they hired a line of labourers and set off for Wau and a gold-mining future, not by air which was then the way to go but, in order to save a few bob, on foot via Shel don’s Track, anew route re

cently cut through by a

government surveyor.

The week between Salamaua and Wau, with a straggling line of carriers also new to the a*ea, was a taste of things to come and prepared them for the road to the Edie, 1000 metres higher, where one of O’Neill’s mates had been offered a ‘tribute’ the mining equivalent of share-farming.

Tributes run out and mates split up and over the next two years O’Neill prospected a dozen places between Edie Creek and the Black Cat. The year 1933 found him with a new mate, Bernard McGrath, in the lately discovered eastern

highlands, generally known as

the Upper Ramu, prospecting

for Purari Alluvials, a small Australian syndicate. From Kainantu, then the only ad ministrative post, he and McGrath scoured the country as far west as the Dunantina River and Bena Bena, with little luck.

The Highlands districts would have been opened up then and there instead of 20 years later had it not been for a series of killings in 1933-34.

Assistant District Officer lan Mack who was in charge of Kainantu station was the first to go, killed in June 1933, when leading a raid on a village suspected of tribal feuding. He was followed by Bernard McGrath, O’Neill’s mate (O’Neill had gone to Lae as the syndicate’s money had run out) killed by Finintegu warriors in February 1934. Ten months later a Roman Catholic mission priest was killed by arrows in the Chimbu valley, and a week later a mission Brother died of his wounds.

The government then concluded, rightly, that the highlanders were not ready for Europeans and closed the whole area. War prolonged the closure and it was not until the 1950 s that the area was thrown

open. The rush was then grow coffee and not prospe for gold.

O’Neill’s next move was in the Upper Watut, Kukukuk country as lethal in its own w as the Highlands, occasional on fair gold, usually no always in discomfort, sufferin recurring bouts of malaria ar eye trouble. In 1937 he move again, this time to the Lowe Watut, with no better luck.

O’Neill went south tc Queensland and did not retun to the Territory. He marriec happily and had three childrer but his life otherwise seems tc have had more downs than ups particularly after his wife diec in 1972. The years of his youth when he had adventured in New Guinea took on extra lustre, and writing about it no doubt helped fill an increasing void.

However, he did not live to see the published version of what he had recorded. In an epilogue Jim Sinclair con cludes: ‘... He had finished his manuscript. His health was beginning to deteriorate and he feared that he would soon lose the sight of his only eye. There did not seem any point in further living and early on Sun day, July 27, 1975 he took his rifle and shot himself.’

There is more in O’Neill’s book for old New Guinea hands than for anyone else. It bristles with names of people long gone whom no one else would know, and it recalls a life that disappeared with the war.

For those with eyes to see, it does more than that, however: we have had a procession of books since the early 1930s describing how government men opened up Papua or New Guinea, or survived this patrol or that. There are no compar able non-government stories that show as well as this book does that the prospector, recruiter and miner did as much if not more, and in far less favourable conditions.

It is interesting that Jim Sinclair, very much a govern ment man as well as a writer of books, should be instrumen tal in having Jack O’Neill’s story and this slice of New Guinea history preserved in

permanent form.

Judy

Tudor